is the greatest rapper who ever lived in the same way that Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player who ever lived: Some people may argue but they are usually Luddite classicists, incorrigible homers, or hipster contrarians. Biggie Smalls didn’t alter the hip-hop landscape so much as crater it, leaving behind an unfillable void and an unhealable wound. Ready to Die is not the greatest rap album ever made, and probably isn’t even the greatest rap album made in 1994-it sags at times with superfluous skits, some of its production touches have aged awkwardly (congrats to that whistling synth hook on “Big Poppa” for owing 20 years’ worth of royalties to The Chronic), and Sean Combs’ somnambulant hype-man routine only grows more irritating with time.īut it is quite possibly the most important, if only for the reason that its maker transformed the music like no rapper before or since. Ready to Die turns 20 on Saturday, and even at a moment when hip-hop is particularly taken with such milestones, this is (fittingly) an enormous one. It’s sad, funny, bleak, brilliant, and then it’s over, and all that’s left is to play the whole thing again. But soon we have dark humor (“it don’t make sense going to heaven with the goodie-goodies / Dressed in white, I like black Timbs, and black hoodies”), deathbed sexual boasting (“My baby momma kissed me but she’s glad I’m gone / She knows me and her sister had something going on”), and cultish, kitschy references to New Jack City and Beat Street. ![]() Coming at the end of an album obsessed with death and all varieties of moral transgression, the opening lines-“when I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell / cause I’m a piece of shit it ain’t hard to fuckin’ tell”-seem to herald the most depressing piece of music in human history. ![]() “ Suicidal Thoughts,” the closing track of the Notorious B.I.G.’s towering debut album, Ready to Die, is two minutes of rhymed confession that culminates in a self-inflicted gunshot. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thelma & Louise-but it takes particular audacity to end with a suicide note. A Harlem subway sign, graffitied by artists between 1980-85, sold for $27,720, three times its estimate.A lot of great art ends with suicide- Anna Karenina, Sgt. ![]() The boombox installation Wall of Boom, by DJ Ross One, sold for $113,400. A 2013 artwork by Fab 5 Freddy, one of hip-hop’s originators, sold for $22,680. Visual artworks by Janette Beckman, Shirt King Phade, rapper Schoolly D and more were also sold alongside flyers, posters and photography. Three artworks from De La Soul’s Daisy Age era trounced their estimates, with a study for the album cover Three Feet High and Rising selling for $21,420 (its peak estimate was $3,500). ![]() Numerous items of clothing were sold, including colourful jackets worn by Salt-N-Pepa at the time of their hit Push It, a suit worn by Dr Dre and prototype Air Jordan trainers designed for Drake.Ī commemorative postage stamp featuring Wu-Tang Clan, and signed by the group’s rapper-producer RZA, sold for $8,190. “What I am feeling has to do with my insecurities, and I have to handle that on my own.” An autographed letter from the rapper also sold for $17,640. “I just want to be less sensitive and less of a pest,” he writes in one. They show an emotional maturity he would soon bring to bear on his music. A cache of 22 love letters sent by Tupac Shakur to his high-school sweetheart Kathy Loy sold for $75,600.
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